Seed: "I am," I cried.
For the last few weeks my youngest has been struggling with some big questions. One night we were going through the bedtime routine. She was just out of the bath, scrubbed clean, and tucked in with still-damp hair moistening the pillow underneath. We sang a couple of old Hoagy Carmichael songs and I lay there a few minutes waiting for her to nod off. I was actually the one to drop off. But after about ten minutes in the pitch black, I hear, “Dad?”
“Yeah, Killer.”
“Isn’t it weird that we’re here?”
“Whaddaya mean weird? And whaddaya mean ‘here’?”
“I mean…just…that we…people…are…just…that they…exist.”
All of a sudden the grogginess of REM sleep washed away. How was I supposed to handle this? This one wasn’t in the parenting manual. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I wanted to handle it right. On the one hand, I didn’t want to just blow off the question because, well, it is THE question, isn’t it? On the other hand, I didn’t want to answer it too much because I didn’t want to give her the impression that there are any answers. But then on another hand (we’re Hindus) I started to worry that if I didn’t offer her any guidance she might develop some warped ideas and grow up to start some new religion. Even worse, I was afraid her overactive brain would run away with the thoughts and she might develop some anxiety or as they say in the trade, existential dread. On still another hand, I wanted her to have the scary euphoria of epiphany and all those other Greek words.
I eventually got her mind to stop racing enough to go to sleep, but then I started trying to reconstruct my own dawning. It didn’t take me long to remember because it is indelibly marked in my memory. I was six and I had just gotten home from kindergarten. My mom always made me take a nap after school (given the kind of kid I was, it was probably more for her sanity than my health) and so there I was lying in my little bed in my little room. The window was opposite me and it had that kind of ambient afternoon glow around the drawn drapes.
The rules were that I didn’t have to go to sleep but I had to stay in bed. No books, no toys. If I made it an hour, I could get up. That day the house was hushed. It was one of those times when you hear a hum or a rushing sound and you realize you’re hearing the silence. Then I heard an airplane flying overhead. I’d heard airplanes before, but on this day I wondered, Who was on that plane? How many were on it? Where were they going? How many planes are in the air at one time and where are they going? Before I could turn my brain off I had projected that single noise out to wondering how many planets had people on them and ultimately whether God existed. My mom carried the day, though. Not long after I had accepted the immensity of the universe and that I exist in it in a very small way, the smell of fresh-baked cookies wafted into the room and her smiling face peered through the door, "Cartoons are on. Time to get up!"
I’m still amazed that I remember that episode so vividly. In fact, it’s my most vivid memory. I’ve talked to the wife about it and she said she can remember her epiphany of self-awareness very clearly as well (there’s probably a good Greek or German word for this; I’m sure Bunky knows it). The funny thing is that when it happens you don’t mark it in your memory as the moment you became self-aware, but years later you recognize it as such.
By way of an update, since that night Killer will blurt out these heavy questions like, “What if God isn’t real?” “If you died before I was born, would I still be born?” The wife is worried she’ll develop anxiety issues, but I think it’s pretty cool to watch.
So, where were you when the lights came on?
posted by St. Fiacre @ 9:45 PM,
1 Comments:
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At Monday, September 03, 2007 7:50:00 PM,
pastgrace said...
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My self-awareness-- more like wondering if we really existed or were we figments of someone else's imagination hit right around when I was 6 years old, too. I remember hounding my parents with the question, "How do we really know we exist." My imagination had us living under some microscope with some greater being looking on observing us. Or we were someone's dream/nightmare. That question continued to plague me for years. Sometimes at the weirdest times I still wonder whether we all exist or not.
